Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Zak Killian

Nvidia may have ended RTX 50 Founders Edition GPU production — report suggests move is in preparation for 'Super' refresh

GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

If you want to buy an Nvidia graphics card, arguably the most obvious place to do so is on Nvidia's website, where they are available at MSRP. Usually, when GPUs go out of stock there, the listing changes to say "Currently Unavailable" — like the GeForce RTX 5090 listing indicated for most of its existence. Now, however, the majority of the Blackwell-based GeForce RTX 50 series Founders Edition cards have vanished from the store entirely, with only the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition remaining.

What does this mean? Well, you can't buy one, for starters. There are still listings for the GPUs at e-tailers like Newegg and Amazon, but they're selling at grossly inflated prices. The reasonable expectation is that Nvidia has run out of stock on those cards and has no intention to produce more.

Nvidia hasn't officially announced the end of production for these models, but it wouldn't exactly come as a surprise. We've been hearing rumblings for months regarding a potential refresh of the GeForce RTX 50 series, and most believe that the new GPUs would come along bearing a 'Super' moniker, just as the GPU maker first did with the GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards back in 2019.

There's only a single Founders Edition card remaining. (Image credit: Nvidia Marketplace)

The RTX 20 Super series brought along significant upgrades to the Turing GPU family, where cards like the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER offered as much as 20% better performance than the original recipe. Things may not play out the same way this time, though; according to the leaks and rumors we've seen, this refresh might be about addressing community complaints concerning the arguably middling amounts of video RAM available on the otherwise bleeding-edge Blackwell GPUs. The GeForce RTX 5080 comes with 16GB, just half of the 5090's 32GB, and the GeForce RTX 5070 only has an underwhelming 12GB.

While these capacities are normally completely fine for a considerable portion of current computer games, a vocal minority of users certainly seem as if they feel shortchanged by the green team's supposed GDDR7 miserliness. The RTX 50 Super refresh should offer a course correction in that regard without a major GPU shuffle thanks to the use of GDDR7 memory packages with the non-power-of-two 3GB capacity.

Assuming no changes to GPU memory bus width, the use of the more capacious packages would allow a memory allotment of 18GB on the purported GeForce RTX 5070 Super, and fully 24GB on the GeForce RTX 5080 Super. For some enthusiasts, whether 16GB is "enough" is out of the question; the argument becomes that 16GB is too puny for a thousand-dollar-plus GPU in 2025. 24GB of video RAM would at least match the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at the same price.

We've asked Nvidia for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.